Body College

As a bodyworker, I know I’m always looking for ways to step into more natural flow, spontaneous creativity and effortless focus.

(One of the things that makes cranial work so attractive to me is that the less you do the more that seems to happen!).

In episode eight of the Body College podcast I share an edited recording of a webinar where I explore some of the Zen and Taoist principles that underpin my approach to biodynamic craniosacral therapy, including:

- Less is more - how to achieve more, without striving.
- How cultivating moments of synchronicity allow things to change internally for a client.
- What early osteopathy teachings tell us about how to achieve non-doing
- Biodynamic craniosacral therapy, the idea of ‘finding the neutral’ and how this aligns with ancient philosophies of non-doing.

You can listen here: www.bodycollege.net/podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.

The power of cranial work comes from its gentleness - the ability to facilitate change without force. In a session, when I feel something let go from the inside, it is one of the most exciting things I’ve ever experienced. In this podcast draw out some of the principles and skills we teach in biodynamics that are rooted in non doing.

The very nature of trauma is that it is overwhelming – it’s more than our organisms can cope with. Trauma often shatters our worldview and rules of fairness and justice no longer seem to apply, which can lead to a spiritual crisis and a profound re-evaluation of meaning.

Trauma can take us to a very primitive place of fight–or–flight or dissociation, and it’s very hard to live fully with a brain screaming “danger!”, or generating life or death scenarios at the slightest stimulus.

The best way to reset the old parts of our brain is to slowly wake up the body. Healing trauma is not about remembering. It is about self-regulating to turn down intense reactions in the body.

A simple and practical way to wake up the body and reset the brain is ‘shaking’, or Tension and Trauma Releasing Exercises (TRE®).

The three statements I share in these images are drawn from the work of Dr David Berceli, creator of Trauma Releasing Exercises (TRE).

You can explore my upcoming TRE trainings at www.trecollege.com

(These images are from my book: Trauma is Really Strange)

I’m a passionate and persistent champion of embodiment. I was like a kid in a sweet shop in my late twenties. There were so many exciting courses and models to study; yoga led to massage, then shiatsu, then zen meditation, and eventually to cranial work.

Now as a bodyworker, and biodynamic craniosacral teacher, all my work is aimed at supporting people to find health and happiness by connecting to the body.

Whatever has happened to you, whatever your belief systems on energy and souls, there is the simple fact of the body. By developing skills to connect to the fleshy space bounded by the skin, my offering is that we can build a container to hold anything that life throws at us.

Learn with me: With all my offerings, my goals are: keep it simple, learn to feel safe by engaging the body more, support people to find agency, creativity and connection.

My books
My four graphic books on pain, trauma, anxiety and touch have been a great success and really helped me clarify my thinking and style of teaching.

TRE courses and professional training:
The psychology of trauma is complex, the physiology is relatively simple. In trauma old parts of the brain are fixed in defence cascades of ‘fight-or-flight’ or ‘freeze’. TRE®, Tension and Trauma Releasing Exercises, are a safe, simple set of exercises that trigger a natural tremor reflex in the body to re-boot overprotective reflexes. You can explore all the courses at www.trecollege.com

Biodynamic craniosacral therapy professional training:
The upcoming two-year courses in London and Galway are suitable for existing health professionals considering adding a new modality to their work as well as individuals wanting to start a career in an exciting and evolving body therapy science. You can find out more at www.bodycollege.net

When we experience trauma, we get stuck in protective reflexes – gestures of survival – such as speeding up to survive (fight or flight) or collapsing / shutting down to survive.

If we can reboot the body, and come out of these stuck reflexes we become much happier and healthier, and our emotions and thoughts are quite different. By changing our physiology we can think more clearly, emote more clearly and remember more clearly.

In other words, when we experience trauma, it’s a bit like our inner guard dog – our threat detection system – either barks all the time, or collapses, withdraws and doesn’t do anything.

Trauma Releasing Exercises (TRE) – a model developed by David Berceli, which emerged from the bio-energetics tradition, uses shaking as a novel stimulus to bring ease, connection and safety to a stuck organism.

We have these old reflexes inside us – if you put your body under a little bit of stress by standing on one leg, you’d wobble and shake, and that’s normal and natural. Shaking is a fundamental feature of how the nervous system controls muscles.

We have central pattern governors – oscillatory neurons in the spinal cord. What we do in TRE is to put those into a positive feedback loop. We get people shaking in safe, easy positions and the involuntary tremors move through the body, releasing tension and generating safe feelings of connection and ease which soothe the inner guard dog.

If you'd like to train in TRE you can join us for the one-year - you can find out more at www.trecollege.com

(These images are from my book: Trauma is Really Strange)

Shaking can release long-held tension patterns and promote new feelings of connection and ease. It is a novel stimulus to the central nervous system. New stimuli, approached with safety and curiosity, can support learning and growth.

TRE®, Tension and Trauma Releasing Exercises, are a simple set of exercises that trigger a natural shaking reflex in the body.

The psychology of trauma is complex, the physiology is relatively simple. In trauma old parts of the brain are fixed in defence cascades of ‘fight-or-flight’ or ‘freeze’. TRE® is a safe, natural process to re-boot overprotective reflexes.

Here are some kind words about our trainings:

I liked the balance of theory and practice and the carefully facilitated shaking sessions. It felt very safe and encouraging. It was great to have firsthand experience of TRE and something I would also recommend to friends, family, and clients. I feel I have a useful life skill to continue to use and build on in the future.
— Brenda Barrass-Pay, psychotherapist

My hips and pelvis have opened up and loosened up in a way they haven’t felt for years, especially since childbirth.
— Kate Munden, EFT and NLP practitioner

The depth and pace of the course was well managed. The concepts were delivered in a very accessible way, accommodating different learning styles. It was supported by a great team. Really learned a lot and really enjoyed it.
— Lucy Levens, yoga teacher and advocate of sexual violence survivors

One of the strongest results I’ve had as a bodyworker was with a stressed lawyer, who’d come with acute, chronic shoulder pain.

The first six sessions, I completely bounced off her. I was still doing a bits of Chiropractic and Shiatsu at the time, and mixing in cranial work. I started by playing with points and manipulated the shoulders, using all my best tricks from my other body work trainings, and nothing really happened.

It was still in the early days of my career, so I revisited the biodynamic approach and did what I was trained to do, which was actually sit down and just listen. Then it got much more interesting.

The acute shoulder problem was making me miss all sorts of other things going on in her body. The thing that came up was that there was this big, sort of absent quality in her pelvis.

At the end of the session she made this incredible statement: “I can’t tell you what happened there, it’s something worse than death,” and then she left.

She had been coming weekly at that stage and I was left with this anxiety around what had happened. She didn’t come back for another couple of weeks.

She came in again, and we started slowly, and then raised this issue of this powerful statement, at the same time holding the abdomen and this quality of not much being there. This amazing story emerged; she’d had an abortion a couple of years earlier, although she hadn’t really wanted to do it. It was a complex story around her partner and getting married, but for her, this quality of “something worse than death.”

That story was upsetting her whole system. She was contracting, and the pain was just being expressed through the shoulder, so her whole system was overloaded and the shoulder was just an indicator.

The shoulder was like the red light on a dashboard. Originally I was just trying to turn the light off on the dashboard, but the whole system was stressed, the whole system was in a fetal position, the whole system was dissociated.

After two or three more sessions she began to be able to feel her abdomen, and was able to talk about the story and acknowledge its consequence for her, and shortly afterwards the acute shoulder pain resolved.

The biggest insight around pain recently is that pain really is not around what’s happening in the tissues. Chronic pain is much more a habit, a bias, a sort of learned pattern in the nervous system.

So pain is a perception and over time, the experience of chronic pain is increasingly divorced from what’s happening in the tissues.

That means, as therapists, we don’t really need to spend that much time aligning tissues – though that can be useful and important particularly at the start of a problem.

But long term it’s much better to help people reframe and embody and creatively retrain their nervous system. That’s a very individual approach.

It works well when done in relationship to a skilled therapist who constantly challenges you to re-examine your experience of your body, and tries to explore new ways of inhabiting your body.

Skilled hands can perceive subtle rhythms There are all sorts of rhythms and pulses in the body; we’re breathing, our heart’s pounding, our fascia actually is contracting.

Our muscle tone changes when standing as we are constantly swaying to help us deal with gravity, neurons oscillate in the brain.

There’s flows of lymph and blood and much bigger rhythms; circadian rhythms, rhythms of maturing, and dying, and sexual cycles.

We have a whole rhythmic quality in our body and these rhythms coalesce to give us moments of coherence, a deep pulse you can feel expressed throughout the body.

That’s a profound and defining part of the biodynamic craniosacral paradigm; there are subtle rhythms that skilled hands can perceive.

Keeping it simple is my constant goal in bodywork. I try to be as present as I can whilst using a light touch.

As the relationship deepens I can be a witness to the patterns held in my client’s gently pulsing body. Something happens, always.

As you may know, although I’ve trained in many approaches, I focus on Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy.

There are two big ideas at the core of cranial work; one is that there is an intelligence and self-regulating principle at the heart of the human experience, and secondly, that the body has many subtle rhythms that skilled hands can perceive.

Our bodies are always striving for health and trying to optimize their balance, and they do that very intelligently.

There’s millions of years of evolution behind the processes and flows and movements in the body, and that’s what we’re truly trying to access.

We can use three statements to help understand working with and overcoming trauma;

1. 'There is trauma' - terrible things happen to human beings.

2. 'We can overcome trauma' - we are wired to survive. We would not be here as a human species unless we had evolved ways of recovering from that lion attack (or sudden loss of a loved one, or being abused, or being in an accident...).

3. 'Healing trauma is about meeting the body' - in trauma, old parts of the brain change how the body works. By paying attention to feelings in the body and learning to self-regulate we can reboot the brain.

The central message from trauma research is that humans are very resilient. We can, and frequently do, emerge stronger and wiser after being overwhelmed.

Train as a Certified TRE® Provider in One Year
Our immersive program to learn to safely teach Tension and Trauma Exercises in one year is starting at the end of June.

This programme will equip you to safely guide clients and groups through TREs innovative series of exercises, to support the body to release deep muscular patterns of stress, tension and trauma.

The training includes:
- Six days of training, in-person. Organised as two three day modules, Go to Venue
- Six group supervisions, online. This is the minimum number you have to attend, you can attend up to ten over the year.
- Six 1:1 supervisions, online. These are mostly with your assigned TRE Mentor and are essential to deepen your practice.
- Feedback on assessments and one Final Certification Session with your Primary CT at end of course.

You can find out more at trecollege.net